New Tales of the Old Ones

by Derwin, Theresa

  Then as if out of nowhere, through the mist and sheets of rain appeared a ragtag ramble of Dunwich villagers. Leading the group was an old man, with long white hair that hung from his head and beard. He wore only a black robe that billowed in the wind, exposing his tattooed chest and arms. In one hand he carried a gnarled staff. In the other, he waved a small green stone in the shape of a five-pointed star.

  Alex and his men stood, stunned by the lightning and the villagers’ presence. The group swarmed around Alex’s small contingent shouting and yelling.

  “Wh’t have ‘ye done?” the old man screamed at Alex. “The black soil, ye fool! Ye broke the earth! Ye have brok’n the seal! Dig not into the black ‘arth. ‘Tis only for the de’d and that which aught to be de’d! Ye’ll doom us all!”

  When the crowd grew larger and started to turn violent, Alex and the rest of his party ran to their cars and returned the next day with security officers from Boston. The crowd was still there. They still screamed and taunted Alex but the security men kept them back from the construction site. It didn’t make a difference. A week later, when the heavy equipment – cranes, trucks, bulldozers – arrived, the locals would sneak onto the construction site and vandalize their equipment, putting sugar into their petroleum tanks and engines so they seized up.

  Worse happened when any of the carts and heavy loads were pulled by horses. It seemed that the horses went near rabid the closer they got to Dunwich. They threw their riders and bolted as soon as they were released from their reins. Within a week, all the horses had fled or had to be shot for trampling their owners.

  IV

  Things steadily got worse from there. Renovations in Dunwich were seemingly impossible, impractical and costly. As Alex’s chief foreman, Donald Coscarelli explained at one of their regular meetings, “I’ve never in all my life seen such a filthy rotting stinking place. Even the slums of New York were cleaner, especially the cellars and basements. That’s where most of the mold and fungus seems to be. Oh, it’s everywhere, permeating every board and brick in every building. Mold like no one has ever seen. Some, I swear, actually glows in the dark. It gives off a queer-ish green glow.” Donald paused.

  “Green glow,” Alex repeated.

  “I swear, a green glow. Also, when we pull up the floors or tear down the walls, everything inside is rotted clean through by a foul smelling fungus. It’s wet, meaty and pulpy, like a jelly mass or what I would imagine fat looks like in the human body. It’s covered in a white spider-web covering, like vines, or roots, that you can hear ripping out of the wood when we pull it free. They are solid, but the pink stuff, that just erupts and oozes everywhere. What a smell.

  “What’s also odd is that if we leave it outside, by morning, it all seems to dry up and blow away,” Donald added.

  “Good, we don’t have to clean it up. Can we save any of the wood?” Alex asked.

  “No. It’s all rotted through. Oh, and the mushrooms. Some of those cellars are full of mushrooms and not just small ones. There are big ones. The biggest anyone, even the cooks, have seen. A few of them are taller than me, believe it or not. We had the photographer take a few pictures.” Donald opened an envelope. Inside were a few 8 x 10 black and white photos which he put on the desk and pushed toward Alex.

  “Go ahead, look for yourself. Especially the last picture. I know this sounds crazy, but look, I’d swear those mushrooms have the same shape as people. Look here is the father...” Donald pointed to the largest mushroom in the picture that had a startling similar shape to a large heavy set man. “Here is the mother, and there are the children.”

  Donald shivered then continued. “Upstairs, we found a large family bedroom and three children’s bedrooms. The rooms, especially the beds, were covered in those white roots. The beds looked like cocoons, it was so thick. Do you know what we found in them? I’ll tell you. Skeletons, human skeletons, so old they were yellowed and brittle. A large man and woman in one room and a child in every one of the bedrooms.”

  Alex was silent for a second, then asked, “Who knows about this? And Christ almighty, what did you do with the skeletons?”

  “Only two of us saw them. Myself and Reynolds,” Donald replied. “We knew the panic they would start, so we hid them in a canvas bag for now. However, some of the men saw the mushrooms before we had a chance to destroy them. Alex, I swear they moved and moaned when our saws cut into them and the puss that shot out of them and the way they quivered, it was bad. Spooked some of the men, they told others.”

  “So, are you telling me people are growing into mushrooms? What do you want me to do about it?” Alex enquired. “What really worries me is, how will it affect the construction schedule?”

  “Are you even listening to me?” his foreman said. “There are some really strange things happening in that town and now some of the men refuse to go down into the cellars. Others are complaining about nightmares and some fool I had to fire today swore he saw the gargoyles on one of the buildings fly around at night.

  “Things are bad and I’ve had over a dozen good men quit this week. That makes over fifty men I’ve had to replace. If this keeps up we’ll be in trouble,” Donald concluded flatly.

  “It will get better, you’ll see,” Alex assured him.

  But it didn’t. Everything was more costly than expected. There were more problems than expected. More people quit and had to be replaced and all of it ate away at Alex and William’s funds.

  V

  Whether it was a tribute to Alex’s determination or simply a case of not knowing when to quit, despite all the obstacles, foundations for the Dunwich Grand Hotel were laid near the turn at Alsbury Pike. Slowly, ever so slowly, over the course of the next few months, the floors rose, one by one. By the fall of 1940, it was nearing completion.

  Originally envisioned to have more than 500 rooms, like its competition in Boston, The Hotel Manager, the Dunwich Grand Hotel was already suffering from a serious lack of capital. The upper fifteen floors had to be scrapped in favor of an observatory deck. Some of the Corinthian pillars were eliminated, not all the chandeliers ordered were actually purchased, the grade of the marble was lowered, and even the huge water fountain by the front doors was abandoned.

  There was one issue that Alex would not hear of being diminished or scaled back due to cost restraints. It was the forty-yard swimming pool.. At 140 feet long and 66 feet wide, it could accommodate 500 bathers at once. It was to be the crowning achievement, destined to become the hotel’s main attraction

  When the first bulldozer pushed its way through the black earth and yellow sod to dig the hole that would become the swimming pool, a re-enactment of the ground-breaking ceremony ensued. As the metal edge of the bulldozer cut into the soil, above them, on a perfectly cloudless day, there was a thunder clap and a bolt of lightning exploded over their heads. Out of nowhere, black clouds started to gather and swirl. Within seconds, the first drops of cold rain started to fall and as mysteriously as before, a crowd of Dunwich villagers, led by the old man in the black robe with the gnarled cane, came shambling onto the construction site.

  “Stop! ‘Ye fools b’fore it’s too late!” te old man screamed, waving his cane and the same green colored pentagram-shaped rock. Alex’s security men sprang to life, keeping the growing crowd away from the construction site.

  They were all Dunwich villagers, pale, gaunt, looking anemic at best. They seemed to have similar features, a few with some extreme deformities. Also, they all seemed to have the same distant look in their eyes and when they weren’t spitting at his workers or Alex they were making a sign with their hands, holding up their pinkie and index finger while holding down their other two fingers with their thumb.

  Alex had never seen it before. When he asked Donald about it, he replied, “My grandmother came from the old country; she called it the evil eye. She would make it to ward off evil. I have seen the villagers wave the evil eye in the air at me too, sir. Don’t let it bother you. These Dunwich villagers are just a
bunch of degenerate and superstitious idiots. Notice how all the last names are almost the same. They’ve been inbreeding with each other for years. Happens to townspeople too isolated. Makes them look strange and act a little stranger. We’ll be done soon, I hope.”

  Unfortunately, plagued by incessant rain and adverse weather, constant labor disputes and every electrical and mechanical problem imaginable, the Grand Dunwich Hotel was rapidly becoming a financial money pit. With funds rapidly diminishing, the planned renovation and restoration of downtown Dunwich had to be first scaled back then finally abandoned, much to the workers’ and Donald’s relief. The restaurants, bars, even the Ahbrahadabra Magic Museum, which was almost completed, was abandoned to mold and rot with the rest of the town.

  Workers, paid partial-salaries, left daily. Tempers were high and fights broke out daily. It was after a rather bloody bout between two immigrant workers that Donald Coscarelli, the main foreman, had another argument with Alex. When he found out that the skeletons in the mushrooms he found in the basement of that house in Dunwich were “accidentally” buried in the cement foundations of the hotel’s pool, Donald quit.

  When the concrete finally dried in and around the pool, the longest and costliest part of the operation could begin. Alex had master craftsmen and artisans use the most expensive imported Italian multi-colored ceramic tiles to create an undersea mosaic mural across the whole bottom of the pool. There were pictures of almost every kind of fish, eel, octopus and crab along with countless underwater plants and corals.

  The pool was finally completed a year later, in the fall of 1941. It was, for one day, one of the most beautiful swimming pools on the North American continent. The water was a sparkling clear-blue color. Beneath it, the whole pool floor seemed to move and come to live beneath the waters.

  Pictures were taken and congratulations were given. Alex felt the thrill of triumph, the feeling that his gamble was finally paying off. That feeling was very short lived. It stopped the next morning. For some unknown reason, the crystal clear water of the Grand Dunwich Hotel had turned oily black, as black as some bog in the swamps. Worse, it smelled foul, like stagnant water near the sea.

  No one could account for it but Alex guessed it was the Dunwich townspeople who had put something in to the water. It was a suspicion aided by the fact that since that day, not one villager came near the construction site or the pool.

  VI

  The pool was the source of more than just lost revenue. It became the focal point of more fear induced gossip. It seemed that after the pool turned black, some of the construction workers disappeared. This was not unusual, but the circumstances were. All left without a word, not providing a forwarding address or an official resignation. All seemed to have left in the night, leaving all their belongings. And by a strange coincidence, all the missing men were last seen near the hotel’s pool. According to the whispers and superstitious ravings of a few Polish and Italian immigrant workers, something alive in the pool, something like a giant serpentine sea monster ate the men!

  The pool was searched but no bodies or anything incriminating were found. It didn’t stop the rumors of a sea serpent in the swimming pool or a growing number of missing men. By the end of November, only about thirty men remained to work. They swore off the pool and only worked on the hotel. Fights were frequent and Alex was glad to have his .38 revolver in his pocket at all times. Twice he had to pull it, once to stop a fight and once to save his own life.

  The final nail in the coffin for the Grand Dunwich Hotel came on the morning of December 7th, 1941 when Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese and the United States was plunged into the Second World War. While a needed boost for the economy, the war effort took immediate precedence over everything else, including the Public Works Commission. As men found steady work enlisting in the armed forces, road work and beautification projects were canceled, including the still unnamed highway that was to fill the rooms of the Grand Dunwich Hotel.

  The road project canceled, William committed suicide a week later. All Alex’s men bar two, quit, demanding their pay and back pay. He paid what he could – under duress – and with no money, he paid the two remaining men with bottles of wine and liquor while he himself took to drinking the rest of the hotel’s cellar dry.

  X

  It was the night of December 21st, the Winter Solstice, the darkest and longest night of the year. Alex had been drinking in the empty bar – there seemed little else to be done – when the stillness of the night was cut by the sudden scream of a man, followed by a loud splash of water.

  Alex scrambled to his feet, grabbed his gun and ran outside. A steady cold rain fell from the sky and lightning flashed around in the heavens. He ran toward the pool, the surface of which was covered in waves, like those on the ocean, slapping against the sides of the pool, sending up sprays of foam.

  “Mr. Alex! Over here!” Sammy, one of his remaining two workmen, yelled, waving frantically at Alex. He was standing next to the pool, shining his electric flashlight at the water while his dog barked furiously at the water. “Help me find him!” Alex guessed that somehow Sammy’s friend Jack had fallen into the pool.

  As if in answer to Sammy’s plea, something came up out of the water. A huge, long, and serpentine creature, the size of a train twisted up out of the water, raising itself fifty-feet into the air. It defied all laws of physics and rules of nature, as it ascended into the night air.

  Alex stared in horror. It was like a serpent of some kind, but covered in gills and barbed wing-like fins similar to those on the sides of the exotic lion fish. The sides of its body were also lined with suction cups of various sizes, themselves lined with barbed teeth and dangling tongues. The top of the creature bent forward, dripping slime and seaweed, and Alex saw the end of it was a massive head, as big as a box car. Two large blue glowing eyes illuminated its snake-like head. Beneath them, its mouth opened but not like the jaws of an animal. Its mouth was round, and like a lamprey, it was lined with teeth that pointed inward and extended down its throat.

  There was something in its mouth, Alex realized.

  For a fleeting moment he saw the missing night watchmen, Jack, tumble lifelessly down the creature’s throat. With a gurgling roar and hiss, it looked down at the remaining motionless night watchman. Sammy stood there, paralyzed with fear. Only his dog moved, barking up at the thing in the pool, dripping water and slime from over thirty feet up.

  The thing in the pool leaned down, its mouth opened wider and it sank down. With a sickly sucking sound, it ate the dog with one quick movement. Then It dropped its head lower, its long tongue came out, encircling the screaming night watchman. Alex watched as the tongue pulled Sammy into its mouth, while the rows of encircling teeth shredded him to bloody pulpy pieces. Sucking those down, it turned its gaze on Alex.

  He froze in his tracks, shock overwhelming his system. He stood staring in disbelief as the water of the pool, the whole surface erupted with dozens of tentacles, waving in the air and stretching up toward the clouds. Even as he watched, two exceptionally long tentacles, waved into the sky. At their height, they started to attract the bolts of lightning that fell from the sky, sending blue bolts down their lengths.

  Alex felt sensations as if something was wrapping itself around his left ankle. He looked down and saw that several small tentacles had emerged from the puddle of water he was standing in. They wrapped around to his left ankle, holding him firmly.

  He looked around frantically. All around him, tentacles were waving freely in the rainy night air. Every puddle that touched, or was connected to the water in the pool was alive with tentacles, just like the surface of the pool water. It was growing and spreading like a contagion. As the rain continued to fall, so did the puddles.

  Tentacles waved in the air around Alex as if he were in a forest of moving trees and branches. Panicking, knowing he would be completely surrounded in mere seconds, Alex made one last desperate gamble and splashed the water puddle with the tentacles
holding his right foot. The water erupted into small drops, scattering the water and the tentacles in the water.

  Scrambling, clawing his way away from the pool, he ran toward his car. The keys were still in it. He slid into the driver’s seat and took one last look behind. The flashes of lightning had increased, illuminating the whole landscape. Over the top of the ten story hotel, Alex could see the gigantic tentacles and that huge head swaying in the air. With a scream, he put the car in drive and didn’t stop until the next morning when he refueled in Boston.

  Alex was in a state of shock and near hysteria but he was still a Princeton man. He held onto that to keep himself sane, rational and thinking. That thing in the pool ruined his dreams, life, marriage, everything. He had one all-consuming desire that kept him from losing sanity. He was going to kill it. He knew where to go to learn how to do it. He was going to Arkham, to the Special Books Room of the Miskatonic Library.

  VII

  Alex didn’t consider his appearance until he stood in the middle of the first floor of the Miskatonic Library late that afternoon. He looked haggard at best, unclean, unshaven, nervous and exhausted. He nervously thumbed through the card files until he heard a voice, in a thick English accent, ask “Can I help you sir?”

  Alex turned around. A student sat behind the front desk. Had he not been so distracted, exhausted and if he hadn’t still been in a state of shock, he would have noticed more her auburn hair, pale white skin and delicate elfin like features. Instead he simply looked at her name tag.